BITPro UG Meet – Windows 2008 R2 Virtualization Jump Start

On 2nd Jun 2012, I had the opportunity to attend the Bangalore IT Pro UG Meet, it was a full day session at Microsoft Bangalore, the agenda was “Jump Start to Windows 2008 R2 Virtualization Exam 70-659. It was a great event, many UG leads and experts around with a great audience. The most important part was it was a fully interactive sessions. I really appreciate how speakers handle audience queries (it was a almost full house crowd), they took enough time to explain and clarify the doubts even stood back after the sessions to listen to those specific questions from the audience.

I really like such UG Meets, where people dont just listen to the speaker and leave, they communicate with the experts and the Leads taking proper care to listen and answer. Since it was a full day event we had a great luch and coffee breaks too (just to keep you up and running). And finally to note that the event did start on time and was on time end.

Session Summary:

First session was an overview of the Hyper-V components and Architecture, then followed by a complete drill down on the architecture and backup restore. Later the third session was on security and best practices. I would try to summarize all of these together below based on my limited knowledge on Hyper-V.

Hyper-V Hardware Requirements:

Network Adapter: Each VM can be assigned up to 12 virtual network adapters, out of which 8 of type “Network Adapter” and 4 of “Legacy Network Adapter”. For better performance of Network Adapters, Integration Service is required.

MAC Address: You can configure Static or Dynamic MAC Address. Hyper-V Supports VLAN and you can create unlimited number of Virtual LANs and a maximum of 512 VMs can be assigned to a particular VLAN.

Hardware Devices:

Virtual IDE: There can be upto 4 IDE Devices, Note that your startup disk (the disk where Virtual OS is installed) must be on a IDE device.

Virtual SCSI Device: Maximum of 4 Virtual SCSI Controller, each controller can have upto 64 disks totaling 256 Virtual SCSI disks. SCSI also require Integration Services to be installed on the Guest OS, probably that is the reason you cannot use SCSI for your startup disk!

HDD:

Virtual Hard Disk: there are three types of VHDs – Fixed, Dynamic, and Differencing, VHDs can be of maximum 2040 GB.

Fixed: The full capacity of the VHD is allocated at the time of creation(it takes some time to create the disk initially due to this), and this gives better performance.

Dynamic: The full capacity of the VHD is NOT allocated at the beginning, but the disk is expanded as and when data is added to the disk. This is good in a capacity contraint setup such as Lab or Development, but not for Production.

Differencing: In this a parent VHD is kept as read only, and all the changed blocks are written as differencing vhds, multiple differencing vhds(child image) form a diferrencing chain. You should not make any changes to the Parent VHD and both parent and differencing vhd should be kept on same location.

Physical Disks: There are no Virtual limitation on physical disks. Physical Disks are used as pass-through disks, for this the Original Physical disk attached to the Hyper-V host should be Offline (It Means, first initialize the disk, make it online, and then bring it offline). Physical disks give maximum performance.

Integration service components:

This is a VM component (or may be drivers) to be installed on the Guest OS, it will enable many features for the better VM performance and Guest to Host Integrations. Below are the components included in Integration Services.

Operating System Shutdown (Enables a shutdown function from the Host by using a WMI Call)

Time Synchronization (enables Guest to synchronize time with Host)

Data Exchange (I think its called key/value pair, I do not get it clear yet.

Heartbeat (Host sends heartbeat requests to see if the VM is responsive or not)

One thing interesting I noted in the hyper-v console support for virtual floppy drive, its hard to find machines with floppy drives, so how is this useful – I wonder (mounting iso to a floppy drive ??)

Windows Hyper-V Architecture

Parent(host) Partition and Child(guest) Partition:

The hypervisor manages resources by dividing the system into partitions, hypervisor makes use of two types of partitions:

Parent partition – The parent partition is where the operating system and the Windows Virtualization components reside, there will be only one parent partition.

Child partition - A child partition is a virtual machine. A new child partition is created when you create a new virtual machine.

Partitions are fully isolated.

Did you know: Complete Hyper-V code is of 6MB(or was it KB), cool right?

HyperCall: Hypercalls are interface used for interacting between the Guest and the Host.

Important files: Vmswitch.sys – driver where the hyper-v switch is implimented and Hvboot.sys -Hypervisor Boot Driver. Check the excel file provided in my skydrive for a list of files and process, i have got this from google.

Do not forget the Hyper-V Powershell cmdlets ( I didnt see any native cmdlets in Hyper 2.0)

Learn network types: Private, Internal, External

Essentials for Hyper-V to launch – Must Have:

Intel XD Bit or AMD NX bit

Set in BIOS Settings (some times Advanced BIOS)

Goodies:

At the end of last session on QnA and Exam tricks, five questions where asked as Quiz and whoever got the answer right first did recieve free 70-659 exam voucher, and my friend Sudeeptha got one.

There are few more free 70-659 exam vouchers to be distributed, and the criteria is to complete virtualization track “Microsoft Virtualization for VMWare Professionals – The Platform” – a cource from MVA and send the proof(screenshot) of each assessment completion (i guess it can be send to info@bitpro.in – if this is wrong i will update the correct address here).

Our UG Lead Kaliyan did share some further learning materials, which includes few pdfs and video files, i have uploaded them to my skydrive you can dowload them for reference, i couldnt upload the videos as the max file size is 300Mb and the video files are more than 600Mb.

Further Learning:

Link to my skydrive: (Only pdfs shared at the event and some more i have collected from internte are available)

Virtualization Jump Start Videos:TechNet Video – This contains all the 12 Session Videos of the jumpstart you can view online or download for offline viewing.

Born to Learn: This site contains information about lots of new events for learning, check it out – there is an event this month on Windows 2012 Jump Start – there is one catch, it all starts 21:30 IST and untill 4:00 in the morning.

Conclusion:

Okey – So, lets get Virtualized* and get certified if you are lucky to have the free coupon or you are ok to pay for the exam

* Virtualize when it makes sense and Dont Virtualize when its stupid to do it. So for your critical applications understanding to be virtualized or not to be virtualized is the key and these sessions and learning will help you do that too.